The Effect of Using Comic Strips on The Eighth Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement at SMPN 5 Jember

Abstract

Reading is an active process to construct meaning. Reading has a great role in teaching learning process because by reading, students are able to relate or connect every kind of learning skill. The main purpose of reading is to understand the whole text or story. But the fact shows that the students cannot understand very well about the text given. Therefore, the English teachers have to determine the effective media to make the students more understanding the text easily. They can apply media to help the students in teaching and learning reading comprehension. media are expected to create a more interesting reading comprehension class. Media can also be used to transfer the learning material to reach the goal of study and increase the students achivement. In this research, the researcher considered to use comic strips from the internet as visual media in teaching reading comprehension. Quasi Experimental research with Post-test Only Design was used in this research as the purpose of this research was to know whether there is a significant effect of using comic strips on the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 5 Jember or not. The researcher chose SMPN 5 Jember as the research area because comic strips as visual media has never been used by the English teacher in teaching reading comprehension for the eighth grade students in the 2017/2018 academic year. The number of the respondents were 72 in total. 38 students were in the experimental and control classes. The respondents of this research were VIII D as the experimental class and VIII A as the control class. The experimental class got treatment by using comic strips, while the control class used picture in series with text. There were two kinds of data used in this research, they are, the primary data and the supporting data. The primary data gained from the students’ reading comprehension score on post test. While supporting data were used to gain the data from the result of interview and documentation from the school. Before the research was conducted, the researcher had conducted a homogeneity test to know whether the population was homogeneous or not. By using ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) on SPSS (Statistically Package for Social Science), the homogeneity test result showed that the population was heterogeneouse, thus the researcher chose the participants of the research from the two classes which had the closest mean score. Therefore, two classes were chosen as the participants was 76 students, consisting of 38 students of grade VIII D as the experimental group and VIII A as the control group. The primary data of this research were analyzed statistically by using t-test formula to find the significant difference of the experimental group and the control group. The result of the t-test formula analysis showed that the value of the significant column of Levene’s Test was 0.519, which means that it was higher that the significant degree (0.05). The variances of the two groups (experimental and control groups) were the same, the equal variances assumed should be read. The t-test value was 0.029. Because it was lower than the significant degree (0.05), the null hyphothesis saying that “There is a significant effect of using comic strips on the eighth grade students’ reading comprehension achievement at SMPN 5 Jember” was accepted. Based on the result of the research, some suggestions are proposed to the English teacher, the students and the future researchers. For the English teacher, it is suggested that the English teachesr of SMPN 5 Jember use comic strips as the media in teaching reading comprehension skill as consideration and information to create relaxed atmosphere in the classroom in teaching reading comprehension skill. For the students, it is suggested that the use of comic strips can help them practice reading comprehension skill because comic strips as visual media that consist of some pictures combined with words that can make the students more interested in reading English and they can enjoy reading English texts. For the future researchers, hopefully it can be used as a consideration to conduct a further research dealing with a similiar topic by using a different research area and different research design such as classroom action research to improve the students’ reading comprehension skill by using comic strips at other schools.